No One Will Hear

by Joel Hames

  “What’s the plan?” he asked, and I realised I didn’t have one.

  “Make sure Colman’s OK,” I said, for want of anything else. He didn’t move his arm.

  “And after that?”

  I thought, for a moment.

  “Force him to confess,” I said, finally, and Brooks-Powell snorted a brief, mirthless laugh.

  “How do you think we’ll do that?”

  “The mania,” I said, and smiled. Brooks-Powell frowned at me. “He’s ruthlessly rational, right?”

  “Right. That’s why he won’t confess. Not a chance.”

  “Except when he’s manic. Look, when he killed Maxine he wasn’t rational, was he? When he killed Elizabeth he might have been, but when he wrote that message on her wall? No. Manic. We get him there.”

  He nodded, slowly. “OK. I’ll follow your lead.”

  He stood behind me as I rang the doorbell and heard again that tinkle that had been the last sound out of Colman’s phone before the line went dead. I could see why it had gone dead, too – I’d had just the one bar of signal as I approached the door, and none as I stood there and steeled myself. I glanced behind me – Brooks-Powell was still there, wearing the expression of someone waiting for life-changing news. There would be no hammering on any doors this time.

  As I’d expected, it was Trawden opening the door. I glanced at his hands, searching for a knife or a gun or anything that would tell me what I was in for, but one hand was empty and the other held a china teacup.

  “Come in, Sam. And you too, David. Please. I’ll get the kettle on. I’m sure you could do with some refreshment. You’ve had a long night, I’d imagine.”

  Without thinking, I followed him into a cosy room with a fire in the grate, a sofa, three armchairs. One of the armchairs was occupied by a large grey cat, which eyed us suspiciously as we entered. The sofa was occupied by Vicky Colman, a china cup in her hand, too, and, to my immense relief, very much alive and apparently unscathed. No thanks to Martins. I glanced to my side to confirm Brooks-Powell had followed me in, and we sat ourselves down in two of the armchairs. Colman looked up at me and smiled, a small, strained smile that didn’t sit well on her face.

  “Are you OK?” I asked, and she opened her mouth to say something, but then Trawden was back, all smiles and bonhomie, and whatever it was Colman had been about to tell me died on her lips. I hoped it wasn’t important.

  “Tea? Coffee?” he asked. Brooks-Powell shook his head, and I asked for a coffee, black, three sugars. I didn’t want a coffee, not really. But I wanted to hear what Colman had to say.

  When he returned to the kitchen I asked her what had happened.

  “Nothing,” she replied. I tried to read her – she was good at hiding things, I knew that much already, but I’d seen her cunning and her disappointment beneath the mask before. Now I could just see confusion, and tiredness. “He was waiting for you to get here. Said you wouldn’t be long. And then, just small talk, what’s on the telly, what it’s like living in the country, what Martins is like, as a boss, all that. I tried to ask him what was going on, why he was posing as Connor, the website, all that, but he just kept saying to wait, all will become clear, he said.”

  I could hear a whistle from the kitchen, an old-fashioned kettle approaching the boil. “I’ll do the talking,” I said, and she looked at me like I was mad.

  “No you won’t.”

  “I think –” I began, but she cut me off.

  “There’s three of us here, and only one of us is a cop. You just stay quiet, OK?”

  She turned to Brooks-Powell, as if for support, but he shook his head.

  “Sorry, Colman,” he said, “but I think he’s right. There’s three of us here, and one of us might be a cop, but this is something new. We’re amateurs, all three of us. Sam’s just been playing the game a little longer.”

  She stared at him, then at me, for a moment. Then she nodded, and Trawden was back with the coffee and that smile, again.

  “So,” he began, shooing the cat away and seating himself in the one remaining armchair. “You’ve tracked down Paddy Connor. Excellent work. I congratulate you.”

  “Thanks,” I replied. “What with all the blackmail and manipulation of evidence and perverting the course of justice, you haven’t made it easy for us. I’m feeling quite proud of myself.”

  I wasn’t. Not really. I was feeling scared and out of my depth, and Trawden’s air of calm had knocked whatever certainty I’d had right out of me. I hadn’t known what to expect when we got here, but sitting down having a coffee with a nice fire warming my back wouldn’t have been anywhere on the list.

  “Now then, Sam. It’s all very well making accusations, but you need evidence to back them up. I don’t think you’ve got that evidence.”

  “We’ve had some very helpful conversations, in the last twelve hours,” I replied. I’d started on the offensive. I might need to change tack, but now wasn’t the time. “We’ve heard some interesting things, Edward. I’m sure the people we’ve been talking to would be more than happy to repeat those things to the police.”

  Trawden shrugged. I’d used his first name deliberately, to show him his sense of ease and familiarity wasn’t getting to me, to show him I could give as good as I got. But saying Edward hadn’t produced a flinch. None of it had.

  He sighed. “I’m sorry, Sam.”

  “What for? Have you poisoned the coffee?”

  “No,” he laughed. “Nothing quite so crude from me, if you don’t mind. No, Sam. I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time. Lizzy Maurier can say what she likes to the police. She was half-deranged before her mother’s death, and that unfortunate incident seems to have finished the job. Her testimony would be no more convincing than my cat’s.”

  “Perhaps,” I countered. “But Lord Blennard has had a bit to say for himself, and I suspect he’d cut a respectable figure on the witness stand.”

  He blinked, and shrugged again. “An angry man. A desperate man, obsessed with his own sins, his youth, all those failures that could so easily have been monumental achievements had he applied himself properly. Had he not chosen to hate himself his entire life.”

  It was a good answer; however impressive Blennard was, I had little doubt a decent defence barrister could tear him to pieces on the witness stand. And it wasn’t like either of them, Lizzy Maurier or Charlie Blennard, had told us Trawden had killed Maxine Grimshaw. On the contrary. In their world, he was an innocent man, a man who’d just needed a little help proving that innocence. Although I wasn’t so sure about Blennard. That repeated What have I done? – there was something in that, a realisation, perhaps, that he’d gone further than he’d ever admitted to himself in order to protect his name.

  But none of that mattered. What Lizzy thought, what Blennard thought, what Trawden said, the shrug. None of it mattered. What mattered was the blink.

  He’d blinked. Not one of those involuntary, hundredth-of-a-second meaningless blinks everyone does every minute of the day. This one was brief, certainly; if I hadn’t been staring right at him, I wouldn’t have noticed it at all. But it was the blink of a man who has just had something thrown at him, the blink of a man protecting his eyes and what lay behind them, the blink of fear. It had come, and it was gone, and with anyone else I might not have thought a thing about it. But it had come when I’d mentioned Blennard, and part of me was wondering whether Trawden hadn’t been thrown by that. Whether he hadn’t seen, just for an instant, his world come crashing down, undone by his own miscalculation. Whether he hadn’t recognised his old failure, the failure to see that at a certain point, with the right stimulus, a man on the edge might do something Trawden didn’t expect him to.

  I put that blink in my armoury and sipped on the coffee, and listened as Trawden told us all what a lovely village it was and how delightful the neighbours had been, although, he said, he didn’t care much for the dogs. More of a cat man. I looked round at Colman, sitting quietly drinking her tea, glancing at m
e occasionally with narrowed eyes that seemed to ask what the hell I was doing and why I was doing it. Brooks-Powell stared blank-faced into the fire, no doubt turning Charlie Blennard over and over in his head until he found somewhere he might fit. Neither of them could see where I was heading.

  But they hadn’t seen the blink.

  Trawden was explaining the characteristics of the different three pubs the two-hundred-yard High Street had to offer when I interrupted him.

  “How did Connor die?” I asked.

  He stopped, and looked at me with a frown.

  “I understand it was liver failure. Hardly surprising, with that sort of person, Sam. Now, as I was saying, the Bell is very popular with the younger crowd, it’s not really my sort of thing, but the landlord’s a pleasant enough –”

  “How did Akadi die?” I asked.

  “The inquest hasn’t yet taken place, as far as I’m aware, Sam. The Feathers has a pool table, which is quite nice, and I’ve tried my luck against some of the locals. No hustling out here. None of us are very good, and everyone knows the players who are less bad than everyone else –”

  “How did Evans die?”

  He gave a sigh, a muted sigh of exasperation, and shook his head as if disappointed with a favourite student.

  “Do you really believe this line of questioning is going to get you anywhere? I’ve already told you. You have nothing on me and you won’t get anything on me. That being the case, we might as well make the most of you all being here at half past seven on a Sunday morning in December and try to have a pleasant hour or two before you decide to go home. What do you think, David?”

  Brooks-Powell continued to stare at the fire.

  “David? Aren’t you enjoying our little chat? Or would you rather be at home with your glamorous and immensely wealthy wife?”

  Brooks-Powell shifted his head, slightly, and said “Fuck off”. Trawden gave a mock flinch, and went on.

  “I suppose she isn’t there anyway. I suppose she had to get away. I suppose she has needs, David. Needs you, of all people, can’t really fulfil.”

  There was no reaction. Trawden frowned, then smiled, hardly bothering to disguise his surprise. He’d picked the wrong time to go after Brooks-Powell. A few hours earlier and it might have worked. But after what we’d heard at Blennard’s place, after what Brooks-Powell himself had let slip, there wasn’t anywhere left to push him.

  “How did Maxine Grimshaw die?” I asked, in the brief silence that followed, and Trawden sighed again, but didn’t answer. I wasn’t leaving it there. I wasn’t settling for – how had he put it? – a pleasant hour or two.

  “That was a mistake, wasn’t it? The others, they were calculated. Elizabeth Maurier, and the other three?”

  He looked blankly at me, but then, he would have done.

  “You do remember their names, don’t you?” I asked, and he continued to gaze at me. “Paul Simmons. Alina Singh. Marcy Granger. You do remember them? Or did you ever even know them?”

  Nothing. I pressed on.

  “They make sense. Sick as it is, they make some kind of sense. They had to die, because otherwise your plans might not have worked. Otherwise, you might have wound up back in prison. But Maxine Grimshaw? That wasn’t something you’d have done in the cold light of day.”

  He stared at me. Just stared. Took a sip of tea. Stared again.

  “No, Sam,” he replied, finally. “I wouldn’t have done it. I wouldn’t have done it because I am not a murderer and I am not a paedophile, and the fact that I am not a murderer and I am not a paedophile is now a matter of public record, thanks to your sterling efforts twelve years ago. For which, Sam, I will always owe my heartfelt thanks.”

  He smiled, again, and it occurred to me that when I pictured Trawden it was always with a smile on his face, that whatever else shifted, whatever other guise he wore, the smile was as close to a fixture as it got, and that I’d never once trusted it. There was always a sense of something behind it. The horrors he’d witnessed in prison, I’d thought, twelve years ago. The natural defence of a shy man thrust into the limelight. Nerves – the normal, everyday nerves that normal, everyday people have in abnormal situations. Now I saw something different. I saw calculation. I saw tactics weighed against strategy, moves considered, played out, in the mind’s eye, rejected, accepted. And I saw the possibility that his strategy and his tactics and all his moves could be undone, in an instant. If the right moves were made against him.

  “You’re good at this, Edward,” I said, flashing his smile back at him. “You’re very good indeed.”

  “At coffee?” He shrugged. “It’s just instant. I’m glad you like it.”

  “You know what I mean. You’re clever. You know what people want, what they fear – isn’t that all there is, really? If you know what a person’s after and what they’re afraid of, if you can seem to offer one and protect from the other, or to withhold and inflict at will – well, you can control a person, can’t you?”

  Trawden frowned, cocked his head to one side, as if he were giving serious consideration to my question. He wasn’t, of course. It was an act. Everything was an act, with Trawden. If only I’d seen that twelve years earlier.

  “I suppose you’re right. In theory,” he smiled. “In theory, of course, because I don’t believe real, functioning adult human beings can be pushed around like that. Too complex, Sam. Too many variables.”

  “And I suppose that would be true,” I shot back, “if the targets – victims, I should say – if they were just people chosen at random. But what if they weren’t? I mean, people are complex, yes, but people with particular fears, particular desires, specific vulnerabilities? People like that can be distilled into their one weak spot, can’t they, Edward? People like Akadi want money. People like Blennard, they just want safety, security, protection, they want to be free from the fear of exposure. And people like Lizzy Maurier? What do they want, I wonder? What does Lizzy Maurier want?”

  I was thinking back, as I said it. Thinking back to what she’d told us, earlier, in her living room. Wonderful, she’d said. That there was something wonderful about him. And even as I asked the question, I had the answer. I pressed on, before Trawden could respond.

  “She wanted to break away, didn’t she? She wanted to break out from under the shadow of her mother. And who better to help her do that than you, Edward? Who better?”

  He laughed, suddenly, a high-pitched, uncontrolled laugh that jarred, that made Colman sit bolt upright and rattle her china teacup on its saucer, that drew Brooks-Powell’s gaze from the fire and etched a frown across his face. I ignored the laugh.

  “The thing is, Eddie” – I was pushing it with that Eddie, I knew, but it seemed the right way to go – “you think you know what these people are going to do. You look at the – what was it you said? You look at the variables, and you make your adjustments, and you get it right, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. You push them to a point – to a wall, I suppose – you push them all the way there, and that’s very clever, I applaud you. And they don’t say a thing, the whole time. They’re silent. If they’ve got something to say, well, no one will hear, right?”

  I looked at him. The smile was still there, but it seemed somehow stretched. Painted on. Perhaps it had always been like that. Perhaps it had taken all this to see it. I went on.

  “Only, at a certain point, your calculations stop working. You think you know what they’ll do, but you’re wrong. You don’t know what people will do when they break. When they’re pushed too far. You didn’t know Lizzy would talk. You didn’t know Blennard would talk.”

  He blinked, again. On Blennard. Twice on the same name. It wasn’t a coincidence. Mixed in with the anxiety and the sheer exhaustion, a bubble of excitement rose inside me. There was a chance this was going to work. There were all kinds of things wrong with the plan, not the least of which was that I had no idea what would happen if I drove a psychopath to mania.

  But I’d cross that bridge wh
en I came to it.

  24: The Silent

  “HOW IS LIZZY?” he asked, suddenly, a perfectly friendly question in a perfectly friendly voice. “How is lovely little Lizzy?”

  I waited. I looked at Brooks-Powell, who returned my gaze and then glanced down to his right hand, which had formed a fist and was pressing hard against his left. It had worked on Blennard. He raised his eyes back to mine, questioning, and I shook my head. He shrugged. I turned to Colman. The excitement was past. She hadn’t been with us to Blennard’s apartment, hadn’t heard everything we’d heard, and now her eyes were drooping and occasionally snapping wide open as she remembered where she was. She was drained, shattered, all of us were shattered, all except Trawden, who looked between us, into space, wistful. He was pushing us all, moving us around the board, picking us up and putting us back down where he chose.

  Suddenly, I was fine with that. If he thought he was pushing me it might be easier to push him, to pick him up and put him down in that place where he was so certain of his superiority he slipped up and made a mistake. The place he’d been in when he killed Maxine Grimshaw – because I was sure of it now, as sure as I’d been that he hadn’t killed Maxine Grimshaw twelve years earlier. The place he’d been in when he’d looked down at Elizabeth Maurier’s body – murdered not in mania but in cold, calculated reason – and then looked up, seen the wall behind her, and decided to leave a message. But I realised, as I looked at Brooks-Powell and Colman, that he’d rather punch Trawden into mania than push him, and she didn’t know the plan anyway. I’d be pushing by myself.

  “Lizzy’s fine,” I said. “As well as you could expect, after all you’ve put her through.” I didn’t want to talk about Lizzy. It wasn’t Lizzy that made him blink.